Google Fiber To Launch In Austin, Texas In December

retroworks writes WSJ blog reports on Austin, the third city to get fiber-optic high speed internet networks laid down by Google (Kansas City and Provo, UT were the first and second). The service averages 1 gigabit per second, about 100X the average US household speed, and costs $70-120 per month (depending on television). Google promotes the roll-outs by holding "rallies" in small neighborhoods. The sign-up process starts in December, focusing on south and southeastern parts of Austin, a Google spokeswoman said Wednesday. It was announced that fiber was coming to Austin back in April.

Comments

I live in the Northeast part of Austin...

[Dimwit]

...and I'm never getting fiber internet. Certain parts of the city are completely ignored for infrastructure upgrades. We just spent $10 million putting bicycle repair kits and air pumps in the richer parts of town, while delaying the sewer installation in my part of town (we were annexed by the city in 2007 and were supposed to have sewers hooked up in 2012...it's 2014 and now they're saying they "hope" it'll get done by 2015). We spent another $1-2 million on "sharrows", which are little arrows that go in the roads to show that we should share those lanes with bikes. We also just spent something like $30 million finishing a bicycling bridge over Town Lake.

In other words, rich people in the south and southwestern parts of town get whatever they want on the taxpayer dime while people in the north and east have to put up with roads without sidewalks, failing sewer systems, and lackluster police protection. Yay.

Re: I live in the Northeast part of Austin...

[gueryjones]

I live in southwest Austin. You know, the part where Google Fiber ISN'T being built out. Maybe it has more to do with density and demand than with haves and have nots.

Re: I live in the Northeast part of Austin...

[TWX]

Demand density is almost certainly a factor. In the mid-nineties I was in one of the first neighborhoods in the US to see widespread cablemodem adoption. It was a dead-center middle-class neighborhood with properties that also weren't too physically large, so that the number of subscribers per square mile made it cost effective to roll-out the network changes needed for it.

Now magnify that 100x for brand-new fiber. They probably aren't using existing dark fiber since it's owned by others, unless they've been quietly buying it up wherever possible, so they'd have to license space on poles or in conduit or have to put in their own conduit, they'll have to design their infrastructure and install and terminate everything, just to set up a backbone. Then they have to take it the last length to the property once they have subscribers.

Poor neighborhoods, even high density ones, will be late to roll-out since they'll have less subscribers per square mile, and wealthy neighborhoods with especially low density will also be late to roll-out for the exact same reason.

Re:I live in the Northeast part of Austin...

[buddyglass]

Check out the map of drops. Westlake, Tarrytown and Northwest Hills (between Mopac and 360) were completely skipped.

Re:I live in the Northeast part of Austin...

[CastrTroy]

Even as somebody who doesn't have a car and cycles just about everywhere, I find that spending $10 million dollars on bike repair stands to be ridiculous. First, if I get a flat, I don't want to walk even 500 meters to get to the repair stand, because that would take 8 minutes or so, by which time I could almost be done fixing the tire with the tools I bring with me. And it's not likely that they are going to have a repair stand every 500 meters. A high estimate of what it would cost to supply yourself with the tools is probably around $50, so for $10 million, you could outfit 200,000 cyclists with their own repair gear. Which is 10-20% of the population depending on if you just count the city, or metro area.

Living in KC

[crazyprogrammer]

Austin may be the third city to get Google Fiber, but that doesn't mean Kansas City is all up and running. I live in Kansas City and I'm still waiting for my Google Fiber connection to be hooked up. The fiber is now on the utility pole behind my house, but they haven't run the fiber to my house yet. A recent email from Google stated that it might be as late as spring 2015 before my neighborhood is hooked up.

In the mean time, I plan to improve my latency by hiring Lorenzo Cain to run my external HDs to/from whom ever I'm trading files with.

Re:Living in KC

[TWX]

Fiber work takes time and is very labor-intensive. Even aerial fiber requires effort and planning, and just because your home is spitting-distance to the backbone, that doesn't mean that there aren't still several phases of the project necessary in order to go the last hundred-feet or to light-up that fiber.

It's possible that the central office or local exchange is still being built. It's possible that the local exchange doesn't have its own backbone to the CO finished yet. It's possible that the CO or local exchange is still waiting on the switching equipment. It's possible that they're waiting on the demarc equipment, as ME-grade switches are made in fewer numbers than customer premises LAN equipment. It's possible that they're still coordinating crews for the labor. It's possible they're still doing permitting for the final service-tie-in or are even just working with tree-trimming companies to make sure that foliage won't be a problem. It's even possible that they're waiting for the subscription count to get high enough to increase the priority of that particular neighborhood's hookup, to make it financially viable.

Re:Living in KC

[fishybell]

Brutal. I live in city #2 (Provo, UT for those not keeping track), and, because I can't really help myself, all I can say is: this post brought to you via Google Fiber.

Originally, quite a bit of time was spent doing upgrades behind the scenes, then they switched everyone who was on the iProvo network to Google, then they started adding new customers in built-out neighborhoods. I am lucky enough to live in a neighborhood that they switched over relatively early. It looks like they've got quite a ways to go before they finish the built-out neighborhoods. There are a couple of places that people live that aren't built out, and those people will end up in the same end as you. Right now though? I see several Google Fiber branded vehicles a day.

For those at home wanting to know what it's like? Honestly, from a web-usage stand point it's about the same as the XFinity service we had before. When Google announced they were coming to town XFinity waved a magic wand and we went from sub-50, with highly inconsistent service to 100-plus with very good reliability. In the reliability department, Google is slightly better (it's only been a month, so we'll have to see about the long-run still). As far as the routers provided by both: the XFinity box had more options for power users and the Google box has all the power-user options (even simple stuff like staticly assigned DHCP) hidden fairly well. I'm not convinced the router is the best available, but my landlords don't want to swap it out.

Re:I can hear the hipster rejoice from here

[TWX]

I'm not a hipster and I'd be rejoicing if it came to my city. Gigabit for the cost of my current crappy broadband cable, or FREE (sans installation cost) for the same speed as what I get from my crappy broadband cable now?

Hell, I've been planning on cabling my home, this would be the sort of thing to make me implement those plans even with the construction that I'd need to do for pathways and an MDF...

Re:I thought this said Australia

[jonwil]

Blame the combination of Telstra (who don't particularly like the idea of a network it has no control over and earns no money from as would have been the case for a FTTP NBN), Foxtel (who see a high speed network killing off their overpriced crappy pay TV offering) and the big movie/TV companies (who see a high speed network as leading to increased levels of piracy)

Looking forward to the year 2174 A.D.

[BenJeremy]

The year they finally get around to having 10% of the country wired for fiber.

nearby, the cable co announced gigabit cheap

[raymorris]

About two hours from Austin is College Station, where the cable company has long been providing about 10mbps for $70 or so. They just announced this will be the first place their speed will go to 100Mbps for no extra charge, and gigabit will be available for a little more. I'm thinking they noticed Google fiber down the road and figured they better get their act together.

There hasn't been much real competition until Google fiber - just DSL, at the same slow speed and the same price, but several weeks to get set-up.

Re:nearby, the cable co announced gigabit cheap

[TWX]

They're full of shit. They're probably oversubscribed already. Sure, one subscriber without others on the line (remember, these are shared-bandwidth networks!) may be able to achieve 100Mbit speeds, or even one in the middle of the dead of night without other users to contend with could hit those speeds even on a shared line, but you're looking at lots of users on a segment. They throttle you to a certain speed because that's the fastest they can give you when utilization is low so that when utilization is high you don't notice the difference between the two too dramatically.

Most broadband providers now are in the same situation as dialup companies were at the end of the nineties; with dialup a provider needed to avoid oversubscribing more than about six users per phone line or digital-equivalent to avoid busy signals, but in order to be profitable they had to sell far more subscriptions. Some of the worst were 20:1 and actually getting a connection was nearly impossible. Remember redialing endlessly? That's where we're at with copper broadband now, they have to oversell to make it profitable but then everyone hates how poor the performance is, and the schmucks in customer service take the brunt of complaints, and they provide poor customer service because there's nothing they can do about it, and the corporate officers, board, and stockholders profit off the difference.

Re:I can hear the hipster rejoice from here

[1gig]

While I generally agree with you I have to admit that I live in North Pflugerville (between Austin and Round Rock) about 2 miles from Dell in a new neiborhood. I have had Fiber to my house since I moved in 7 years ago. While there is no telling when if ever Google will come to my area as soon as they anounced they were coming to Austin AT&T finally got off there butt and turned on all the fiber they already had installed all over the area. True if you are in an older neiborhood it will be awhile before you get fiber but if you happen to live in a newer neiborhood (less than 7-8 years old) there is a good chance you already have fiber to the home and that means 1Gig from AT&T. So far the service has been fantastic! Yea it's AT&T and I would prefer Google but hey they are matching Googles price and speed so no complaints at this point.

I want slower for cheaper

[EmperorOfCanada]

I want 10mbs for around $10. Basically I don't need that much for work during the day and Netflix at night. I don't even need that great a ping time.

Keep in mind that those are the needs of someone who develops software that is heavily network centred. Once in a blue moon when I really need a full iso of a linux distro I might grumble that faster would be better but I am not sure that I would notice the difference 99.9% of the time.

Re:I want slower for cheaper

[TWX]

If what I read on Google's fiber website is right, they're offering free lower-speed fiber connectivity so long as one pays for the installation cost, around $300. My guess is that if a subscriber likes the free, they'll upgrade to paid 1Gb, if they already have the connection in place.

Re:I want slower for cheaper

[Durrik]

oh I'd love 10 mbs. I'm stuck with only one provider where I live. No cable, just CenturyLink DSL. I have the fastest service they offer in this area, a whole 7 mbs. And I get to pay $70 a month for it too. When I called up customer service about it, they seemed shocked that we only got 7 mbs for that amount, and then he looked at what was offered in the area, and apologized because that's all they have. I have a 70 ms ping to the speed test servers. Shows you how bad it is when they don't even care about faking speed test because there's no competition in this area.

What's frustrating is that a half mile west there's Cox. A half mile north there's cox. A have mile south there's cox, and a half mile east cox has partial coverage to northern half of the area. Just this one little area of new construction doesn't have Cox, and when I asked them when they'd get to it, they didn't know. I know cable sucks, and is a shared service, but its better than my 7-70-70 service (mbs, ping, price).

It takes about 30 seconds for my wife to load her facebook page, and her other pages. I don't really know why it could be so shitty. We have to unplug the modem at least once a week because it seems to die on us, and we seem to change IP addresses every 2-3 days. When both of our computers started downloading the latest round of windows patches it literally killed my wife's google talk page.

Re:I want slower for cheaper

[rainmaestro]

I'm in the same boat. I'm paying $60/mo for what is typically 11-12mbs. I've never found a need to have anything more than that. Sufficient to download games in 1-2 hours, stream Netflix, and do my job (typically involving VPN and a few RDP sessions). I guess going up to 100mbs or gig would be worth it if there were 5 people in the house all trying to stream video and play games at once.

I'd rather see the low end packages get cheaper than get higher speeds that I have no use for.

Re:I thought this said Australia

[Sulphur]

Structured Highspeed Internet Technology, Mate.